\n
Vitaly:<\/strong> the production of the book was a very intense process and a very exciting project. The Smashing Book is a result of the cooperation of creative and talented designers, writers and readers across the globe, making the Smashing Book a unique and very special book for designers and developers. We had some problems, but overall it was truly amazing to help all the little pieces come together, improve it over and over again, to end up with a solid, useful result. We hope that we did at least some things right.<\/p>\nIn fact, it seems that we have experienced almost every single problem that can happen to a publisher when preparing a book: missed deadlines, chapters that were delivered after deadlines and still didn’t meet our quality guidelines and therefore were rejected and re-written by us, problems with the layouter and many many other things. It took much more time than we expected and caused much more problems that we were anticipating. Last three months were very hectic, but we have never given up and stubbornly worked through it. <\/p>\n
We are very excited about the feedback from the readers and their opinions about the result of our little project. We tried our best to create a useful, interesting and exciting book for designers and web developers, but it’s up to users to decide if we did a good job or not. Traditional publishing is definitely an option, but we want to see how our first book will go first.<\/p><\/div>\n
Chris:<\/strong> I’m curious if you face difficulty in growth or reader engagement at this stage in Smashing Magazine’s life. I can imagine viewers feeling like “I would comment…. but it will just be lost in an ocean of comments.” or “I don’t even need to bookmark SM posts in Delicious anymore, since I’d be pretty much bookmarking every single article.” Are these issues you face?<\/h3>\n\n
Vitaly:<\/strong> Yes, we do face similar issues at the moment. As a publisher, we always happy about professional discussions that are taking place in our comments section, but often it’s hardly possible, because there are too many comments. Still, we encourage our readers to participate and we also offered them a nice community forum where discussions indeed take place. In fact, we are planning some changes in our comments section very soon, so we hope to have tackled this issue in September – October.<\/p>\nHowever, we do not face the problem with social media. From the very beginning we’ve tried to do our best to provide users with useful high-quality content and it seems that our users respect that and forward links to our articles via social media – be it Delicious, StumbleUpon or Twitter. We appreciate every single bookmark, vote and tweet and I think that since we try to publish articles on a wide variety of design-related topics, it is hardly likely that many users will bookmark every single article on SM.<\/p><\/div>\n
Chris:<\/strong> Writing about web design and development I find strangely meta some days. For example, publishing an article about web form usability and then seeing that some of your own forms don’t follow the tips. Or publishing an article about CSS sprites but noticing that on your own site you aren’t taking advantage of this everywhere you probably should be. Do you find this comes up a lot for you? Do you end up using stuff posted on Smashing Magazine right on the Smashing Magazine website itself?<\/h3>\n\n
Vitaly:<\/strong> Absolutely. When updating the site or discussing some front-end \/ back-end issues with my colleagues or friends, I always refer to Smashing Magazine as my first source. Since we have a very strong quality control, only manually hand-picked resources are presented in our posts which makes it plausible to search there for answers to problems related to design and web-development.<\/p>\nOf course, as web designers, we need to learn every single day and improve our skills by observing what other professionals do and, more importantly, how they do it. In fact, that’s exactly what the main purpose of Smashing Magazine is – a large platform where ideas can be exchanged and shared and where best design and programming practices are presented. We also learn from our articles and the articles in the Web design community every single day and if we find problems with our own site, we try to solve them in order to improve overall usability and user experience of the site.<\/p><\/div>\n
Chris:<\/strong> I imagine your bandwidth usage is pretty huge. What kind of technology do you have in place to keep Smashing Magazine up and running and snappy, anything fancy?<\/h3>\n\n
Vitaly:<\/strong> We have a customized server cluster solution which has been installed, configured and is being monitored by our administrator Rene Schmidt. Overall, we have 7 servers now and we probably will have to purchase even more servers next year.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"You probably recognize his name, but if you don’t, you certainly recognize his work. Smashing Magazine is a juggernaut in the design and development web publishing world, and soon to cross over into traditional publishing as well. Vitaly is the most public figure behind Smashing Magazine, and I got the chance to ask him some […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_bbp_topic_count":0,"_bbp_reply_count":0,"_bbp_total_topic_count":0,"_bbp_total_reply_count":0,"_bbp_voice_count":0,"_bbp_anonymous_reply_count":0,"_bbp_topic_count_hidden":0,"_bbp_reply_count_hidden":0,"_bbp_forum_subforum_count":0,"sig_custom_text":"","sig_image_type":"featured-image","sig_custom_image":0,"sig_is_disabled":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"c2c_always_allow_admin_comments":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":[]},"categories":[4,21],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"acf":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":2180,"url":"https:\/\/css-tricks.com\/round-2-of-smashing-magazine-qa\/","url_meta":{"origin":3601,"position":0},"title":"Round 2 of Smashing Magazine Q&A","date":"February 6, 2009","format":false,"excerpt":"I probably won't announce it every single time here anymore, but I am doing a regular column of Question & Answer over on Smashing Magazine now. The second installment is up, where I answer questions about list bullet colors, rollover buttons, website widths, left-tab navigation, and bringing up a modal\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Article"","img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":2111,"url":"https:\/\/css-tricks.com\/smashing-sitemap\/","url_meta":{"origin":3601,"position":1},"title":"Smashing Sitemap","date":"January 23, 2009","format":false,"excerpt":"I wrote up an article for Smashing Magazine on creating a colorful sitemap with jQuery. It covers all kinds of things, like semantic markup, enhancing with CSS3, building a quick jQuery plugin to avoid repetitive code, and more. Links to the example and the download are over there! 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